Tourism and Crisis

Gustav Visser, Sanette Ferreira

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138081826
• eBook ISBN: 9781136289446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Economics

The new millennium has been characterised by several crises ranging from dramatic acts of terror to natural disasters, as well as the most significant economic recession since the late 1920s. However, despite such challenges the global tourism system has in the main retained its past vitality although in some cases in a different form. The book investigates different kinds of "crisis" and unpacks understandings of crisis in relation to various components in the contemporary tourism system.

The aim of this book therefore is to critically analyse the relationship between tourism and crises. The volume focuses on the roles and potential of tourism for development and relations between tourism, environment and broad global process of change at different levels of analysis, highlighting different types of "crisis". In particular it questions the general conviction that tourism-led development is a sustainable and necessarily solid platform from which to develop local, national and regional economies from a range of perspectives.

Written by leading academics in the field this book offers valuable insight into tourism's relationship with socio – cultural, environment, economic and political crisis as well as the challenges facing future tourism development.

1 Tourism and crisis

A never-ending story?

Gustav Visser and Sanette Ferreira

The global financial and economic downturn that has affected the tourism system since 2007 has cast significant attention on the role that crisis events play in tourism. The seeming increases in the impacts of economic downturns, political instability or natural disasters on tourism are arguably not a result of any increase in such events but instead illustrate the way in which the world's economies, transport systems, media and communication networks have now become so integrated that, when one destination (market) or region has been affected, then the impacts can reverberate through the entire system. Tourism is a global scale industry that increasingly impacts on the cultural, economic, social and environmental dimensions at the international, national, regional and local scale. In both developed and developing countries, tourism provides new opportunities such as employment and economic benefits to local communities. Currently, many countries see tourism development as an expedient and relatively inexpensive strategy by which to attract foreign direct investment through, for example, showcasing natural areas, cultural heritage sites and local indigenous cultures. As a result of growing tourism expansion as a key contributor to economies, many places in the world are increasingly tied to the tourism system and related cultural, social, economic and political networks.

At the same time, however, tourism is deeply influenced by its changing physical, economic and social contexts, and larger processes such as global climate change or financial instability, that present major challenges on a range of fronts. The current global economic credit crisis has underlined the impact of shifting economic fortunes on the tourism system and the vulnerability such a development strategy poses. However, the argument should be considered that ‘crisis’ and its relevance to tourism is potentially a continuous and ever changing challenge for places that focus on tourism-led development – economic or otherwise. What this book aims to demonstrate is that ‘tourism and crisis’ means different things to different people, with myriad meanings and impacts over space and through time.

The past five or so years have been framed as those of economic crisis. In many ways, this ‘crisis’ has been focused on the developed North. Whether or not the economic challenges of the developed North are a crisis for all, in terms of the global tourism system, needs to be considered carefully. It is suggested that, although ‘the’ or ‘their’ economic crisis is a global ‘crisis’ and something all countries or regions deploying tourism as a developmental tool ought to keep in mind, this is not a necessary outcome. It is equally important that the crisis has very diverse impacts on tourism systems that translate to crisis in some places but opportunities elsewhere and across different tourism product ranges.

The collection of essays assembled in this book started as a response to the ‘initial’ financial, or credit, crisis in the northern hemisphere during 2007. In many ways the longevity of this crisis was probably not anticipated by all when the Study Group of the International Geographical Union Commission on the Geography of Tourism and Leisure and Global Change decided to convene a meeting focusing on Tourism and Crisis at Stellenbosch in 2010. As organisers, and we dare say for many participants, we were not of the view at that time that the issues surrounding the crisis, particularly its economic dimensions and the tourism system, would last as long as they have. In some ways, it was assumed that the economies of the North would recover and that various tourism systems would be ‘back in business as usual’ relatively soon. Nevertheless, and as this collection of essays demonstrates, it was also evident at that meeting that there is a range of other crises that can and do impact tourism development and that are not being considered. What crises are we referring to, and where, and in which terms? A further theme of discussion was whether or not tourism might not perhaps always be in some sort of crisis, but depending on where you are and in terms of which variables we discuss crisis.

It has to be acknowledged that the response and preparedness of the tourism system to crisis has long been of interest to tourism scholars. Indeed, the significance of various crises for tourist behaviour and demand and their consequent effects on destinations has resulted in a substantial academic literature, with particular attention being given to issues of implications for crisis and risk management, assessment, forecasting, impact estimation, indicators, public relations, recovery strategies, communication and knowledge management, and security. The collection of essays in this book aims to make a modest contribution to the developing literature on tourism and crisis. It also reflects the concerns of only a handful of tourism scholars and their interests. Unlike some contributions to this field of research, we do not suggest this contribution to be definitive – by virtue of the topic at hand this book is part of an ongoing debate.

This book investigates some aspects of crisis, or more accurately crises, related to a range of tourism systems and argues that various tourism systems are always in crisis depending on where you are located, what tourism product is at stake and the temporal milieu of both a destination and the tourist-generating region. This investigation is deeply geographical for it considers spatio-temporal issues in the description and understanding of an economic system that is (or is not) always in some form of ongoing crisis. As demonstrated in this collection, there are many ways in which to view crisis in tourism. Tourism is inherently linked to capitalism and consumption: a crisis in capitalism will produce a crisis in tourism. Then again, such a statement can be tempered by specific and localised events. It might be that the world economy is growing, but there is no necessary or equal corresponding impact on the global tourism economy, and vice versa. Moreover, these impacts are locally specific and negotiated in myriad ways.

Key issues in this book are framed by C. Michael Hall in Chapter 2, which forms part of two conceptual and policy-oriented contributions. These two chapters deal in the main with the meta-environment in which the tourism system functions. Hall is of the view that there are limits to the environmental and socio-economic fixes that maintain capitalism's growth and reproduction. Indeed, the increased frequency of economic and financial crises together with growing opposition to the measures used to correct such problems suggest that some of those limits may be being reached. There are also ecological and social limits with respect to biodiversity and ecosystem loss. Tipping points appear closer than ever. But, argues Hall, from the majority of the tourism literature we would never know this to be the case. This situation may be because capitalism is not regarded as an issue, it is just there – and accepted by the academy, policy think tanks, government and consultants as such. Or, he suggests, it may be that, because the primary subjects of tourism – the tourist and their trips – are the wealthier elements of society in money and time, these commentators do not notice. Or it may be that so long as academic etc. salaries are being paid then we neither notice nor care.

Hall suggests that, while crises are seen as short term, the marketisation of everything and the continued loss of natural capital are long term – and do not fit into technical rational frameworks of crisis management and recovery. Yet even from a managerialist perspective there is a clear need to understand the way in which various crises interact with others and how this complicates the response to crisis at both a policy and business level. There is also a need to ask that, if crisis events are in fact a ‘normal’ part of doing business, should not industry then be the ones who respond from their own contingency funds and market actions?

In this chapter, it is argued that, although some crises appear to be recurring, it is also clear that issues keep emerging that challenge tourism. The current economic recession clearly provides many challenges and opportunities to destinations and businesses. The environment has also been an expressed concern for tourism for well over thirty years, yet there is little sign that it is becoming any more sustainable. Some natural disasters are hard to plan for, but the level of knowledge of the possibility of crisis events occurring means that contingencies can be made. The record of tourism industry learning with both the natural and economic environment is not good, however. The same old solutions are trotted out. Hall suggests that we face what might otherwise be described as a policy failure. In seeking to understand crises, far too much attention has been given to the assumption that a well-designed institution is ‘good’ because it facilitates cooperation and network development rather than a focus on norms, values and institutionalisation as the first and necessary steps in the assessment of what kind of changes institutional arrangements are promoting and their potential outcomes. This may be described as third-order change, or a paradigm shift. Yet any understanding of the potential for changing the framework by which we understand crisis needs to be grounded in research of the interrelationships between power, values, norms and interests and how they influence the selection of policy instruments, indicators and settings within broader frames of governance and change. This requires taking neoliberal capitalism from the background of tourism and making its interrogation essential to an understanding of contemporary tourism and its contribution and response to crisis.

In Chapter 3, Tim Coles takes these contentions further and they are made more concrete. He joins with Hall in demonstrating that the economic crisis of the past five or so years has had a profound effect on travel and tourism throughout the world, with significant implications for future tourism development. The ostensibly ‘only economic’ downturn has induced the restructuring and reorganisation of consumption, production and administration, the effects of which are only now beginning to be revealed and whose impacts should be more carefully considered in future research efforts as they unfold. Coles argues that terms such as ‘global economic downturn’, the ‘financial crisis’ or ‘sovereign debt crisis’ have been often and conveniently adopted as shorthand for the macro-economic downturn since 2007. This, however, he suggests, reflects a reductionist tendency to render the inherently complex much simpler. Umbrella terms like these imply that the effects of change have been ubiquitous, and that the same patterns of change have been – and indeed will be – experienced universally. This, Coles demonstrates, is not the case. There have been winners and losers within tourism as in other sectors of economic activity. This chapter notes that aggregated data and high-level forecasts derived from secondary sources serve an important purpose in offering, as they do, significant clues to possible trajectories for the sector. Nevertheless, and importantly so, in their coarseness they have the effect of obscuring more finely granulated features. Within the developed world, the financial crisis has dampened demand, thereby inducing a contraction in the time-space horizons of leisure tourists. Rationalisation of the supply side has accompanied this as businesses have struggled to maintain their competitiveness in altogether more testing operating environments. However, as important as raw demand may be, other more complex features related to the financial crisis, such as the availability and cost of credit, which often go unnoticed and which conspire with the unique features of many tourism enterprises, are also driving change. A more nuanced understanding is desirable – one that does not exclusively rely on modelling, and that instead also interrogates the social politics and political economy of travel and tourism.

Coles's contribution concludes with a set of issues that ought to be considered in future academic and policy research. He argues that, in relative terms, there has been far greater consideration of travel and tourism trends as they relate to the developed world, mainly in Europe and North America, since the onset of the financial crisis. In contrast, there has been far less attention on emergent markets, newly industrialised countries and states to the south of the Tropic of Cancer. In some cases, these economies appear to have been some of the (relative) beneficiaries from the redistributive effects of recent times. A more intensive spatio-temporal treatment of the current episode is proposed, and he highlights a range of issues that emanate from such a suggestion. In many of the contributions that follow, greater balance to such issues in the developing world is provided.

Chapter 4, and subsequent contributions, focus on more empirical interpretations and understandings of tourism and crisis. In addition, a number of the investigations aim to consider travel and tourism trends in the developing world context and against the backdrop of crisis. Daniel Hammett's contribution is concerned with forms of crisis in destination representations in the media in tourism-generating regions. This theme is of relevance to all tourism destinations, in both developed and developing countries. He frames his contribution with the observation that South Africa's transition from a pariah state to a consolidating democracy, reintegrated into the global community of nations, has been tremendously beneficial to the country's burgeoning tourism industry. Prior to 1994, South Africa's tourism sector was domestically orientated, constrained by international boycotts, hostile media framing and a negative destination image. Since 1994, the changing domestic socio-political situation as well as shifts in global geopolitics, advances in transport and technology and changes in the global economy have increased international travel overall, and to South Africa in particular. Consequently, South Africa has invested heavily in developing a tourism strategy that encompasses domestic, regional and international tourism and the promotion of a positive destination image through specific public relations campaigns, interactions with the media and the hosting of a series of spotlight or ‘mega’ events.

South Africa's destination image, like most countries and regions globally, is not purely constructed from the framing and content of these promotional practices. Tourists construct their image/imagination of potential destinations from a range of sources that are interpreted through existing knowledge and frames of reference. News media are one such important source of information about distant locations and potential tourist destinations. The content of news coverage is significant: the often politicised framing of reporting and content selection provides partial representations of people and places. These representational practices often utilise, implicitly or explicitly, discursive themes rooted in ideology and reiterating historical and colonial stereotypes and preconceptions. Potential travellers' conceptions of destinations are therefore produced through subjective processes of interpretation and negotiation that draw upon the information provided through media sources.

Hammett investigates the media framing and discursive representations of South Africa within British newspapers (keeping in mind that the UK is South Africa's main overseas source market). The hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup provided a moment of heightened press attention on South Africa, with the tourist industry hopeful that this coverage would produce a positive destination image. The South African government had hoped that successfully hosting this spectacle event would encourage new media framings of coverage of the country, instigating a shift away from (neo)colonial stereotypes and discursive constructs. Shifts in the framing and content of English media coverage of South Africa in the buildup to and duration of the tournament demonstrate that, despite continued salience of particular, self-perpetuating and discursive constructions and perceptions, there was evidence of a more positive media frame emerging in certain sections of the media. This emergent narrative acknowledged the success of South Africa's hosting of the tournament and witnessed the emergence of a more vocal, critical element directed towards FIFA's quasi-authoritarian control of the sport and major tournaments. The concern addressed in Hammett's contribution is how post-tournament British media framed South Africa in their reporting. As British media attention on South Africa declined after the tournament, were the discursive themes of crime and fear, pre-modernity and race still dominant – or was a more positive frame perpetuated? Newspaper content relating to South Africa is analysed for two two-month periods at six- and twelve-month intervals after the World Cup to ascertain the dominant discursive themes and media frames deployed. This analysis demonstrates a return towards a generally negative and self-perpetuating media frame, with negative implications for South Africa's destination image.

Retaining the focus on the World Cup theme, Chapter 5 investigates how this event has provided a real opportunity to give life to the ninth recommendation of the United Nations World Tourism Organization's (UNWTO) Roadmap for Recovery, namely ‘to improve tourism promotion and capitalize on major events’. Sanette Ferreira untangles the role of this event during a time in which South Africa has not been immune to the effects of global economic recession. The global recession could not have come at a worse time for the South African hotel industry – while the supply of new hotel rooms surged by 10 per cent, demand dropped by 4 per cent. Average hotel occupancies fell to a ten-year low of 60.4 per cent in 2009, down from more than 70 per cent in the boom years of 2006–8. Although she paints a picture of inflated expectations, since winning the bid to host, the World Cup has helped the South African economy to resist some of the effects of the economic recession.

While the global travel industry experienced a decline of 4 per cent in 2009 as traveller markets reeled from the effects of the global financial crisis, the South African pre-World Cup context (or pregnancy effect) saw an increase in meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions (MICE) tourism, and the hosting of three sports events, among others, buffered South Africa from at least some of the effects of the world economic recession and postponed the real effect to the months following the event. The duration of the ‘beneficial phase’ had already started in the years before winning the bid, when South Africa was ‘preparing and competing’ to host the event and the country would be capitalising even more in the years to come on all the new infrastructure and tourism superstructure that were developed for the event. Ferreira explains the costs and long-term development goals, direct and indirect economic benefits, the oversupply of stadia and luxury hotel rooms, tangible and intangible benefits and missed opportunities. In her analysis, she reiterates that it will be a great omission to leave out the role of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). FIFA was able to extract much of the financial benefit of hosting the tournament from bidding countries – thinking of power relationships and political economy. South Africa as a developing country has taken all the risk, while FIFA banked the profit.

Chapter 6 considers the impact of low consumer confidence and its generation of crisis in regional tourism systems. Tanja Mihalič and her co-investigators work from the position that tourism is sensitive to financial and economic crisis on both its supply and demand sides. It is suggested that the global financial crisis has reduced tourism business and consumer confidence to almost record low levels. They argue that many studies using world-level data and some regional data have shown correlations among tourism flows, the economic crisis cycle and tourism confidence. This chapter attempts to study the current economic crisis impact on tourism flows and confidence in the UNWTO's largest (in a number of countries), yet developing tourism region. Its aim is to analyse the tourism crises caused by financial and economic factors, not only from quantitative and qualitative crisis perspectives, but from the side of the power potential of management tools for predicting tourism confidence in the circumstances of such a crisis. It studies the potential of the Tourism Confidence Index (TCI) to predict tourism demand and assesses its usefulness for tourism stakeholders. The results of this investigation generally confirm the usefulness of confidence surveys in predicting tourism demand. Yet, the regional-level analysis for Africa shows that African inbound tourism, in contrast to other regions and world tourism, did not follow the typical economic crisis cycle shape. Different African countries have reacted to the current economic crisis in various ways.

In Chapter 7, Dieter K. Müller continues the theme that, thus far, the interrelationship between crisis and tourism is poorly understood and that there are many different inputs to such a position. He argues that, although there is substantial research on the impact of economic and financial downturns on tourism, it seems that there is a lack of understanding regarding what could be considered crisis and a ‘normal state’. Joining Hall and Coles's contributions, it is argued that the interrelationship between crisis, particularly in the economic sector, and tourism is not unidirectional. Instea...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Tourism and Crisis
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Tourism and crisis: a never-ending story?
• 2 Financial crises in tourism and beyond: connecting economic, resource and environmental securities
• 3 Much ado about nothing? Tourism and the financial crisis
• 4 South Africa's destination image: media framing and representational crises
• 5 Hallmark events as a counter to economic downturn: the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup
• 6 Impacts of the global financial crisis on African tourism: a Tourism Confidence Index analysis
• 7 Hibernating economic decline? Tourism and labour market change in Europe's northern periphery
• 8 The crisis of induced uneven development through South African tourism marketing strategies
• 9 Responses to climate change mitigation during recessionary times: perspectives from accommodation providers in the Southwest of England
• 10 Tourism-led development and backward linkages: evidence from the agriculture-tourism nexus in southern Africa
• 11 Ethnic tourism in Kaokoland, northwest Namibia: cure for all or the next crisis for the OvaHimba?
• Index